From Abracadabra to Zombies

Book Review

Radin discusses perceptual,
affective, and
cognitive biases in chapter 14, long after he has presented
most of his scientific evidence for psi—evidence he thinks
clearly demonstrates the reality of ESP and PK. Chapter 13 is
devoted to his critique of skepticism; I'll address that
critique later.

Radin would have served the reader
better had he discussed the biases that lead us astray before
thediscussion of psi anecdotes and experiments. He waits until
late in the book to discuss these biases because he wants to make a
case against skeptics. According to Radin, skeptics don’t accept psi
because they are deluded and guided by wishful thinking and other
biases. Radin thinks
that experiences (anecdotes) and experiments together provide a slam dunk for psi. Skeptics, of course, think that the anecdotes tell us
a lot about ourselves, but not much about psi. We also are not convinced
by the experiments. Radin’s task in chapter 14, as he sees it, is to explain
why skeptics are so stubborn.

He begins by noting, correctly, that “we
do not perceive the world as it is,” but he adds, incorrectly, we see the world “as we wish it to be.” That is true only some of
the time. He goes on to say that “we construct mental models of a
world that reflect our expectations, biases, and desires, a world
that is comfortable for our egos, that does not threaten our
beliefs, and that is consistent, stable, and coherent.” So far, so
good.

Jim Alcock. a skeptic,
puts it this way: we construct our beliefs “without any automatic
concern for truth.”*
Alcock reminds us that “experience is often a poor guide to
reality.” That is why, I believe, it is important to study the
perceptual, affective, and cognitive biases—the
hidden
persuaders—that can lead us astray before we study the
anecdotes or the
scientific experiments. In that way, we can be guided in our
investigation of both the stories and the experiments by our understanding
of how we are likely to go astray. Alcock also writes: “The true
critical thinker accepts what few people ever accept—that one cannot
routinely trust perceptions and memories. Figments of our
imagination and reflections of our emotional needs can often
interfere with or supplant the perception of truth and reality.”
Radin gives notice of his awareness of this problem in chapter two,
where he notes that memory “is much more fallible than most people
think” and eyewitness testimony “is easily distorted.”

Our minds are “story generators,” says
Radin (p. 229) and the models the mind creates “inevitably
perpetuate distortions.” What we perceive is influenced by “ideas,
memory, motivation, and expectations.” It should be obvious that
many of these influences occur without our conscious awareness. My
own view is that the study of perceptual, affective, and cognitive
biases is essential to the proper evaluation of experiences and
experiments. This study will also help, as Radin notes, our
understanding of “why we should be skeptical of both overly
enthusiastic claims of psychic experiences and overly enthusiastic
skeptical criticisms” (p. 229). I’m also confident, as is Radin,
that this study will explain “why controversy over the existence of
psi has persisted in spite of a century of accumulating scientific
evidence.” However, Radin thinks this study will help us understand
the perverse persistence of skeptics in rejecting psi, while I think
it will help us understand the perverse persistence of people like
Radin who continue to believe in psi despite the poor quality of the
scientific evidence in its favor.

Radin claims that “the bottom line is
that if we do not expect to see psi, we won’t” (p. 230). If we
conclude that psi doesn’t exist, we will also conclude that “anyone
who claims that it does is just stupid, illogical, or irrational.” I
disagree. I have concluded that the likelihood of psi existing is
negligible, but I do not consider all who accept psi as being stupid
and irrational. In fact, it is often the believer's exceptional intelligence
that permits her to find rationalizations for the evidence that appears
to contradict her cherished beliefs.

Radin is right to emphasize the role of
prior convictions in perception, but this should be a preface to a
description of the kinds of controls experimenters must put in place
to prevent their convictions from biasing the outcome of their
studies. Instead, Radin launches into a largely irrelevant rant
about cognitive dissonance, the alleged psychologically
uncomfortable state caused when the facts are inconsistent with
one’s beliefs. Radin’s interest is in showing that skeptics believe
psi is not real, even though the evidence strongly supports the reality of
psi. Therefore, skeptics are uncomfortable and must respond in some
way to deal with their cognitive dissonance. Leon Festinger, who
first studied this concept in the 1950s, thought there were three
possible responses to cognitive dissonance:

1.One may try to change one
or more of the beliefs, opinions, or behaviors involved in the
dissonance;

2.One may try to acquire new
information or beliefs that will increase the existing consonance
and thus cause the total dissonance to be reduced; or,

3.One may try to forget or
reduce the importance of those cognitions that are in a dissonant
relationship (Festinger 1956: 25-26).

There’s a fourth way, as Radin notes,
and that is to take disconfirming evidence as actually strengthening
your original belief, which is what Marian Keech, Festinger’s prime
example of someone with a cognitive dissonance problem, did. Keech
was the leader of a UFO cult in the 1950s. She claimed to get
messages from extraterrestrials (known as The Guardians) through
automatic writing. Like the
Heaven's Gate cult forty years later, Keech and her followers (known as The Seekers or The Brotherhood of
the Seven Rays) were waiting to be picked up by an alien spaceship.
In Keech's prophecy, her group of eleven was to be saved just before
Earth was to be destroyed by a massive flood on December 21, 1954.
When it became evident that there would be no flood and the
Guardians weren't stopping by to pick them up, Keech

became elated. She said she'd just
received a telepathic message from the Guardians saying that her
group of believers had spread so much light with their unflagging
faith that God had spared the world from the cataclysm (Levine 2003:
206).

One might quibble that Keech followed
the second of Festinger’s possibilities: she acquired new
information that transformed the disconfirming data into confirming
data. In any case, Radin goes off in a different direction from
Festinger and argues that another way to deal with cognitive
dissonance is to “apply pressure to people who hold different
ideas,” i.e., ostracize them and label them as quacks,
pseudoscientists, heretics, and the like. However, Festinger
wasn’t concerned with how people deal with those whose views
conflict with the consensus viewpoint. That is a completely
different issue. Festinger was concerned with how people deal with
evidence that disconfirms a cherished belief. Radin considers
ethnic cleansing and witch-hunts as examples of dealing with
cognitive dissonance. Festinger would shake his head and wonder what
such practices have to do with the psychological problem of
discomfort caused by evidence that threatens to shake the
foundations of one’s beliefs.

Radin claims that one reason there is so
much skepticism about psi is that “public ridicule adds to the
unpleasantness of cognitive dissonance” (p. 232). He thinks that
many skeptics dismiss psi without looking at the evidence because
the claims of the psi researchers make them uncomfortable. Again,
Radin mistakenly thinks that cognitive dissonance is caused
by being confronted with views rather than with evidence that
conflicts with some basic belief one holds. Radin is certainly
right, however, in noting (as T. S. Kuhn did in The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions) that there have been several cases in
science where beliefs hindered the ability to see phenomena for what
they were (think astronomy before Copernicus) and where ideas that
were ridiculed when first proposed (such as Wegener’s idea of
continental drift) are now universally accepted. He is wrong,
though, if he thinks these examples are relevant to the reasons the
majority of scientists continue to reject psi research. Scientists
came around to Wegener’s way of thinking when plate tectonics was
introduced and there was an explanation for how continents
move. Nothing analogous to plate tectonics has occurred in
parapsychology that would explain how psi works and thereby
give strong impetus to the reasonableness of accepting that
psi exists.

It is true that some of the criticisms
that have been made of parapsychological and other scientific
research have been made by critics who have not studied the
evidence. It is also true that what scientists believe affects how
they tend to evaluate the quality of design and implementation of
experiments: the expectancy effect. If you expect the results
to be what they are claimed to be, you tend to give the experiment
high marks. If the result contradicts what you expect, you tend to
give the experiment low marks. Review bias, Radin notes, occurs in
all the sciences (p. 235). However, this fact is irrelevant in
considering an experiment and the criticisms that have been made of it.
One can’t assume that all skeptical criticism of parapsychology is
invalid on the grounds that skeptics don’t expect positive results
from such experiments. We have to look at the experiments themselves
and consider the criticisms individually to determine whether they are fair.

Radin is right to point out the problems
of confirmation bias, the tendency we all have to notice and to look
for what confirms our beliefs, and to ignore, not look for, or
undervalue the relevance of what contradicts our beliefs. He warns
us that “we cannot fully trust fascinating psychic stories reported
by groups that expect such things to occur, unless they also
demonstrate that they are aware of, know how to, and did
control for expectation biases.” Radin writes: “Because of the
confirmation bias, skeptics who review a body of psi experiments are
likely to select for review only the few studies that confirm their
prior expectations” (p. 238).

Radin does have a legitimate gripe that
the media are likely to represent psi with stories about celebrity
“psychics” like Uri Geller and his arch-critic
James Randi. Radin’s
concern is that such stories bias the public about psi research. I
think Radin’s biases overtook him when he decided that Geller and
Randi are “so irrelevant to the scientific evaluation of psi that
not a single experiment involving either person is included among
the thousands of studies reviewed” (p. 240). Randi’s evaluation of
the Stanford Research Institute’s processes, by which physicists
Russell Targ and Hal Puthoff evaluated Geller’s alleged PK
abilities, is instructive. Randi’s critique of the so-called Geller effect illustrates Radin’s point about how the strong
belief in something can affect the scientist’s perception and lower
his or her guard when testing for paranormal powers. Geller used a
variety of tricks to create the illusion that he was able to do such
things as bend metal spoons with his mind. Randi, an expert
in the art of deception, was able to detect these
tricks, but rather than admit that their work had been discredited, Puthoff and Targ went on the offensive and accused Randi of not
being fair. Geller even sued Randi, rather than admit he was a
fraud. Geller lost the lawsuit, but the story of Geller and Randi
should have been told by Radin, lest he be accused of being
selective in his presentation of evidence and ignoring all the
evidence that counts against the psi hypothesis.

Radin should also have included Randi’s
participation in Project Alpha.
What happened at the McDonnell
Lab at Washington University in St. Louis under the direction of
physics professor Peter R. Phillips is illustrative of one of the
serious problems that has plagued parapsychology from its
beginnings. The subjects in the experiments on “psychokinetic metal
bending (PKMB) by children” systematically cheated and deceived the
professor for about four years. Randi had taught them how to use
trickery to make it look like they possessed PK powers. Randi is a
student of science, a careful and trusted observer, and an expert on
the art of deception. He may not be a scientist, but he has proven
beyond a doubt that, if it’s the truth you’re after, having a
magician in the psi lab is a good idea.

Radin also discusses hindsight bias,
the way our judgment of how we had judged something in the past
changes in light of new information and deceives us into thinking
that our original judgment was in tune with the new information even
though it wasn’t. Radin gives the example of a person who is
originally very impressed with the results of a telepathy experiment
and who later hears a rumor that the study was flawed. “Hindsight
bias will covertly reconstruct our memory so that we begin to recall
that we were actually not at all impressed by the experiment in the
first place” (p. 240). We should remember, however, that sometimes
we change our mind about an experiment because after hearing a rumor
that it was flawed, we take the time to investigate it and find that
it really was flawed. It is true that sometimes we see things only
because we’re primed to see them by others, even though those things
aren’t really there (as in many examples of so-called
backmasking in
popular music). It is also true that sometimes we are able to
see things at first only because someone directs our attention in a
certain way that allows us to see what is actually there.

Radin seems to confuse hindsight bias
with communal reinforcement. He notes that if we’re repeatedly
exposed to stories about angels and aliens on television, this will
“boost our confidence in those ideas, completely independently of
whether those stories are true” (p. 240). The same might be said of
psychics and psychic ability.

Radin relates his discussion of
hindsight bias to his belief that scientific ideas go through four
(or five, see p. 240) stages, discussed at the beginning of his
book. He thinks stage four for psi will be when “everyone thinks
that he or she thought of it first” (p. 230). I guess he thinks that
once skeptics see that the evidence is in favor of psi, we will
change our minds and claim we knew it all along. He doesn’t seem to
take seriously the notion that some of the criticisms of skeptics
could be fatal to the psi enterprise.

In any case, recent research on
hindsight bias indicates that it plays a positive role in memory
reconstruction. Ulrich Hoffrage, Ph.D., in an article titled
“Hindsight Bias: A By-Product of Knowledge Updating?” argues that
hindsight bias “is a cheap price we have to pay for a much larger
gain: a well functioning memory that is able to forget what we do
not need, such as outdated knowledge, and constantly updates our
knowledge by increasing the accuracy of our inferences” (Journal
of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Vol.
26, No. 3.).

Next, Radin takes up mediated
evidence, data that is filtered through others rather than being
the result of first-hand experience. Edited information is always
selective and biased. Radin says: “we should always be wary of
scientific evidence presented in the brief formats available on
television shows” (p. 241). We should always seek “multiple sources
of similar information and see if the evidence converges.” The
natural tendency, however, is to turn the channel if we don’t like
what we’re hearing. If we like what we’re hearing, we feel no need
to investigate further: the data confirm our bias.

Radin also discusses the sleeper
effect, a memory distortion involving separating the source of
data from the data itself, which allows data from a questionable or
unreliable source to be remembered as good data, or data from a
reliable source to be remembered as questionable.

Radin proceeds to a section called
“beyond the perceptual filters,” in which he brings up issues usually
reserved for writing about pathological thinking or behavior: reaction formation, repression, dissociation, and
projection. He claims that we in the Western world teach our
children not to speak about “psychic experiences.” He claims that
“the more vigorous skeptical attacks on parapsychology are
reminiscent of reaction formation,” a defense mechanism whereby one
unconsciously is driven to act in a way that is in conflict with
one’s true feelings. There is no way to disprove an accusation that
one’s criticisms are tooenthusiastic to be motivated
by honest feelings of disagreement. Such unfalsifiable claims are of
little value in understanding either support or criticism of ideas.

Radin’s discussion of repression is
particularly unenlightening. His example of repression is of being
taught in school not to ask too many questions or wonder about
certain taboo topics. Then, as adults we repress these “rules” and
this “protects us from bad memories about how ‘only crazy people
get psychic impressions,’ and thus the experience will disappear
from awareness almost as fast as it arises” (p. 243). This example
doesn’t seem to be any different from suppression. Yet, Radin’s main
point is worth remembering: we are socialized to conform and to
ostracize those who are seen as “different.” But we should not
forget that most of us are affected by several social groups and
some of the rules we are taught by different groups are
contradictory. Thus, we develop an imperfect hierarchy of rules based on which
social group has the most influence on us. For example, even though
99.9% of the scientific community in America accepts evolution as
the essential foundation of modern biology, 50% of the adult
population rejects evolution in favor of a view that is taught by
fundamentalist religions: God created all species at once a few
thousand years ago. Religious institutions have more influence in
reinforcing the idea that creationism implies evolution is wrong
than scientific and educational institutions have in reinforcing the
idea that evolution is correct.

Radin brings up identification
and introjection to assert that some of us may be influenced
by important people in our lives—including college professors—who
dismiss psychic research as sloppy, and reject psi “because it
contradicts a dozen inviolate Laws of Nature” (p. 244). We may never
be able to cast off such skeptical messages, he says. On the other
hand, we may be influenced by important people in our lives who
dismiss the criticisms of skeptics or who promote the wonders of
psychic research. We may never be able to cast off those messages,
either, which we must do if we are to do a fair and balanced
critique of paranormal research. The moral of the story is that a
critical thinker must learn to think for him- or herself; we must
overcome the messages we’ve come to identify with and
examine them openly. We shouldn't blindly accept everything our
parents or teachers tell us.

His discussion of dissociation is
necessarily curt and superficial, but I don’t think it adds anything
to our understanding of this alleged phenomenon to describe it as
“compartmentalizing” aspects of our lives, such as the religious and
the scientific. Radin comments that scientists who “publicly and
vigorously deny the existence of psi while harboring a couple of
secret psi experiences that they have not admitted to anyone” are
dissociating. He doesn’t name any such scientist who might have come
out of the closet, but to me such a person would be dissembling
rather than dissociating. It is also not clear how Radin would
reconcile dissociation, as he thinks of it, and what he had to say
about cognitive dissonance. I think it might be best to treat
examples of people who publicly deny psi, but privately believe
they’ve had paranormal experiences, as examples of people who fear
others will think they’re crazy and so they not only suppress their
views but pose as holding views they think are compatible with the
majority’s thoughts.

In his discussion of projection—the
perception in others of one’s own faults without recognizing that
the trait one perceives is one’s own—Radin asks the rhetorical
question: Could skeptics who insist that “the only rational
explanation for psi is fraud, collusion, or mushy-minded thinking”
be projecting? To be fair and balanced, I suppose, Radin also
asks the same question of enthusiasts who see no value in any
criticism of psi research and think of critics as “malicious, evil
rationalists” (p. 245). The moral of the story seems to be that both
critics and paranormal researchers should be open-minded.

One might wonder what the point of all
this psychobabble is. Radin’s answer is a non sequitur: “All this leads us to
predict that a person’s level of commitment to the current
scientific worldview will determine his or her beliefs about psi”
(p. 245). His argument has been, up to this point, that the doubters
fall into one of two camps: they are ignorant of the scientific
evidence for psi or they are suffering from a pathological bias that
cannot be overcome.

What we know for certain is that the
more one knows about science the less likely one is to accept psi.
Radin points out that a high percentage of the general public
accepts the reality or possibility of psychic phenomena (68%), but a
smaller percentage of college professors agree, and a still smaller
percentage of members of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science agree, and only about 6% of the members of
the National Academy of Sciences agree. The evidence appears to
support the notion that the more one knows about science, the less
likely one is to believe in psychic phenomena. One might think that
this is due to having more knowledge and understanding of science.
Perhaps, the more ignorant one is of the perceptual, affective, and
cognitive biases that can affect our perceptions and their
interpretations, the more likely one is to accept psi.

Radin says that the disparity in
acceptance of psi by scientists and the general public may be
due to the fact that “the expectations of the scientific elite actually put them
more at risk for being swayed by perceptual biases than the general
public” (p. 246). This claim seems incredible. Does Radin
really believe that the average untutored citizen is more able to
overcome the hidden persuaders than our best scientists? He
thinks that what drives scientists to such bias is the motivation to
protect their careers and credibility. “So if Joe Sixpack and Dr.
Scientist both witness a remarkable feat of clairvoyance, we can
predict that later, when we ask Joe what he saw, he will describe
the incident in matter-of-fact terms. In contrast, when we ask Dr.
Scientist what he saw, he may become angry or confused, or deny
having seen anything unusual at all” (p.246).

Radin's critique of skepticism

In chapter 13, "A Field Guide to
Skepticism," Radin reveals his dislike of critics. Rather than thank
skeptics for their criticisms, he derides them and makes a straw man
out of the appraisals that many skeptics have made of psi
research and claims about the paranormal. If you accept Radin's
account, skeptics attribute all psi experiences to hallucinations,
self-delusion, wish fulfillment, "or other forms of mental
aberrations" (p. 227).

Critics should be welcome if your goal
is the truth. Radin seems unable to accept the notion that maybe the
criticisms of skeptics like Ray Hyman, Jim Alcock, David Marks and
others could benefit parapsychologists by encouraging them to
develop better designs, protocols, controls, and statistical methods
for their research. Instead, Radin complains about critics and
skeptics, as if they existed just to torment people like himself.
Not only are skeptics dismissed as providing mostly invalid
criticisms of psi, the media and college textbooks are taken to task
for their "distorted portrayal" of psi studies. Radin insists that
psi phenomena have been demonstrated in thousands of experiments and
anyone who disagrees is wrong! "There are a half-dozen psi effects
that have been replicated dozens to hundreds of times in
laboratories around the world," he writes (p. 207). Skeptics look at
the same evidence and see no such thing. The conjured proof using
meta-analyses of data culled from various experiments is not
persuasive. To assert or imply that those skeptics who disagree with
his methods or rosy assessment of the data are prejudiced and
deluded is Radin's way of getting back at those critics who assert
or imply that people like him are wasting their lives chasing
chimeras. "Skeptics are fond of claiming," says Radin, "that
believers in psi are afflicted with some sort of abnormal mental
condition that prohibits them from seeing the truth" (p. 224). Radin
returns the charge and accuses skeptics of being obstinate due to
some sort of abnormal mental condition and of accusing society of
being crazy because so many people believe in paranormal phenomena.
"Most of the commonly repeated skeptical reactions to psi
research are extreme views, driven by the belief that psi is
impossible," he says without proof (p. 227). (I know of no major skeptic
who claims that psi is impossible.) The charge sounds hollow, like the whining of
lost dog in the
distance.